Exchange equivilant on Linux?

[Hyperblaze]

Hey Guys,
I'm looking for software which acts equilivant as exchange would but which runs on linux.

It would need to work with OutLook on windows.

Right now I've look at.....

Scalix

LinuXchange

Samsung Contact

Would you folks have any ideas? please let me know. Thanks!

 

[spherrod]

could only find this after a quick search

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6734

 

[bersl2]

Evolution

Goddamnit! This is the fourth time I've either misread "Exchange" with "Outlook," or missed a Windows requirement, or something or other that has caused me to erroneously reply with "Evolution."

 

[Hyperblaze]

Originally posted by: bersl2
Evolution

as far as i know, evolution strictly acts like a client equilant to Outlook when interacting with exchange.

I'm looking for something server side.

Thanks though!

 

[Wyck]

Two projects come to mind: The Kolab Groupware Project and OpenGroupware.org. Good luck

 

[nweaver]

hula....although Calender may not work, esp. with older outlook clients. And you have to for icalander conectivitiy onto outlook.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Not a thread crap, flame bait, or anything of that nature: What about exchange makes people get tingly in their nether regions?

 

[Hyperblaze]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Not a thread crap, flame bait, or anything of that nature: What about exchange makes people get tingly in their nether regions?

licencing issues?

this non-profit company wishes to get exchange working on their server.

If this volenteer team I'm part of can save them a few thousands dollars which can be used elsewhere...why not?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Hyperblaze

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Not a thread crap, flame bait, or anything of that nature: What about exchange makes people get tingly in their nether regions?

licencing issues?

this non-profit company wishes to get exchange working on their server.

If this volenteer team I'm part of can save them a few thousands dollars which can be used elsewhere...why not?

Wrong tingle. Let me rephrase: Why do people like Exchange and prefer it over real email servers?

 

[Hyperblaze]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: Hyperblaze

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Not a thread crap, flame bait, or anything of that nature: What about exchange makes people get tingly in their nether regions?

licencing issues?

this non-profit company wishes to get exchange working on their server.

If this volenteer team I'm part of can save them a few thousands dollars which can be used elsewhere...why not?

Wrong tingle. Let me rephrase: Why do people like Exchange and prefer it over real email servers?

from what the "big boss" informed us about....it was due to calendering.

they want that to schedule meeting and such.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Hyperblaze
from what the "big boss" informed us about....it was due to calendering.

they want that to schedule meeting and such.

Ahh, those coddling features. :roll:

 

[Jzero]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: Hyperblaze
from what the "big boss" informed us about....it was due to calendering.

they want that to schedule meeting and such.

Ahh, those coddling features. :roll:

So what do you recommend? LotusNotes? :laugh:

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Jzero

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: Hyperblaze
from what the "big boss" informed us about....it was due to calendering.

they want that to schedule meeting and such.

Ahh, those coddling features. :roll:

So what do you recommend? LotusNotes? :laugh:

Notes is ass. I recommend people communicate better instead of relying on big expensive pieces of technology to do it for them.

 

[Jzero]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Notes is ass. I recommend people communicate better instead of relying on big expensive pieces of technology to do it for them.

Good calendaring software is invaluable. I'd love to hear some real solid equivalents to Exchange.

 

[nweaver]

Hula has scheduling...it's ass to work with outlook I hear, but it has a decent web interface.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Jzero

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Notes is ass. I recommend people communicate better instead of relying on big expensive pieces of technology to do it for them.

Good calendaring software is invaluable. I'd love to hear some real solid equivalents to Exchange.

Why? What does calendaring software do for you that can't be done with a bit of communication?

 

[Jzero]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: Jzero

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Notes is ass. I recommend people communicate better instead of relying on big expensive pieces of technology to do it for them.

Good calendaring software is invaluable. I'd love to hear some real solid equivalents to Exchange.

Why? What does calendaring software do for you that can't be done with a bit of communication?

See where people are doing. I call my boss. He's not at his desk.
Where is he? It's not like he has to announce to me his every move.
I could call his cellphone and interrupt him...or....I could look on his outlook calendar and know where he is in a single click.

It's also useful for scheduling conference rooms, projectors, videoconference units and other resources. At a single click I can get a view of all conference rooms with VC units and see which ones are available when. I can book the time so nobody sneaks in and everyone can see who reserved it, when and why.

The calendaring software IS that bit of communication. Instead of having to try to coordinate 300 people across 3 continents to just to schedule a simple meeting, I go to one place in just a few seconds.

What's a better alternative?

 

[MrChad]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: Jzero

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Notes is ass. I recommend people communicate better instead of relying on big expensive pieces of technology to do it for them.

Good calendaring software is invaluable. I'd love to hear some real solid equivalents to Exchange.

Why? What does calendaring software do for you that can't be done with a bit of communication?

It's invaluable for scheduling meetings and resources. Say I need Persons A, B and C to attend a meeting. Within Outlook, I can see when each person is busy and schedule a meeting that suits everyone's schedule. The alternative is emailing each person, waiting for them to reply, replying back with a possible time, waiting to hear back, etc, etc, etc.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Jzero
See where people are doing. I call my boss. He's not at his desk.
Where is he? It's not like he has to announce to me his every move.
I could call his cellphone and interrupt him...or....I could look on his outlook calendar and know where he is in a single click.

It's also useful for scheduling conference rooms, projectors, videoconference units and other resources. At a single click I can get a view of all conference rooms with VC units and see which ones are available when. I can book the time so nobody sneaks in and everyone can see who reserved it, when and why.

The calendaring software IS that bit of communication. Instead of having to try to coordinate 300 people across 3 continents to just to schedule a simple meeting, I go to one place in just a few seconds.

What's a better alternative?

That makes sense for large organizations, although I'd just email my boss if I couldn't get him on the phone.

Thanks for the great response.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: MrChad
It's invaluable for scheduling meetings and resources. Say I need Persons A, B and C to attend a meeting. Within Outlook, I can see when each person is busy and schedule a meeting that suits everyone's schedule. The alternative is emailing each person, waiting for them to reply, replying back with a possible time, waiting to hear back, etc, etc, etc.

That assumes everyone uses those features. I had access to an exchange system at plenty of jobs, and I wouldn't even be able to tell you how to access those features.

 

[Zelmo3]

I found a few open-source options. OpenChange doesn't look like it's ready yet, but should be working within a year.
More promising is OpenGroupware.org, which looks to be in stable condition and has combined with OpenOffice.org.
Better still is Novell's SuSE Linux Openexchange Server. It's been in use for a few years, from the looks of it. You can also get open-xchange separately, which is the back-end for the SuSE solution, but is supposedly more difficult to use.

 

[drag]

Hula is going to be the closest to what is the best. It deals with strictly calendering and mail and forgets all about document collaberation and stuff like that. They figure just stick to the basics. It's based on a code release by Novell for their webmail system.

Strictly speaking it's just webmail right now, they are working on calendering features and it will eventually support a wide range of e-mail clients. Evolution (eventually to be ported to Windows), Outlook, Thunderbird, and they are making a calendering protocol for calendering specific applications.

You see, specific tools for specific purposes, instead of the pre-internet sceme of building a single monolithic application for all your document proccessing, file sharing, user information. Which was what things like Exchange were originally designed for.

Most of what people use them for is calendering and email.. and that's it. The rest is cruft. The majority of it is cruft.

That's what the failure of things like OpenExchange come from. They are trying to meet feature for feature with Exchange and your not going to get community support going for it becuase the vast majority of the community has no use for it. Hula tries to concentrate on simply delivering what people want and what people need and if anybody wants more they have a system of plugins and extensions that people can build on.

Sort of like Firefox browser.

Unfortunately it's not ready for prime time. It's fine for Webmail and personal projects, but I wouldn't want to try to replace Exchange with it, at this point.

If you want something that works right, works right now, will be a feature-full replacement for Exchange, and will run on Linux, check out Novell's Groupwise.

Groupwise is a similar monolythic groupware tool like Exchange and designed around the same time. It runs on a veriaty of OSes and will support Linux clients using Evolution as well as Windows clients running Outlook.

Groupwise. A Suse server running Groupwise is going to cost you, but it's cheaper then a similar setup using Windows. It's not open source. They have a no-cost eval version for playing around with.


(if you dont' need all that and only need email, then you have lots more choices, lots of choices when it comes to anti-spam/anti-virus and all that fun stuff.)

 

[Nothinman]

That assumes everyone uses those features. I had access to an exchange system at plenty of jobs, and I wouldn't even be able to tell you how to access those features.

Same here. I have a calender and crap and I never touch it. If I agree to a meeting it gets put in my calender, but otherwise it never gets used. But for secretaries, it's invaluable because they can schedule crap and allocate resources pretty easily and quickly with it.

If you want to use the Outlook calendaring you're probably screwed for now. You can probably find some decent web calendars or something that will work with Mozilla Sunbird though.

For mail any IMAP server will do. Outlook IMAP support isn't that great, but unless you have thousands of files in a folder it should be fine. I really like Cyrus IMAPd, but it's a bit of a pain to setup.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

That assumes everyone uses those features. I had access to an exchange system at plenty of jobs, and I wouldn't even be able to tell you how to access those features.

Same here. I have a calender and crap and I never touch it. If I agree to a meeting it gets put in my calender, but otherwise it never gets used. But for secretaries, it's invaluable because they can schedule crap and allocate resources pretty easily and quickly with it.

If you want to use the Outlook calendaring you're probably screwed for now. You can probably find some decent web calendars or something that will work with Mozilla Sunbird though.

For mail any IMAP server will do. Outlook IMAP support isn't that great, but unless you have thousands of files in a folder it should be fine. I really like Cyrus IMAPd, but it's a bit of a pain to setup.

Nice to hear I'm not alone.
I actually don't have a clue about how to schedule a meeting myself, though I do get invited to them, which gives me a reminder 15 minutes ahead of time, which is nice.

Of course, IMO 90% of all meeting are utter crap and a waste of time.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Sunner

Originally posted by: Nothinman

That assumes everyone uses those features. I had access to an exchange system at plenty of jobs, and I wouldn't even be able to tell you how to access those features.

Same here. I have a calender and crap and I never touch it. If I agree to a meeting it gets put in my calender, but otherwise it never gets used. But for secretaries, it's invaluable because they can schedule crap and allocate resources pretty easily and quickly with it.

If you want to use the Outlook calendaring you're probably screwed for now. You can probably find some decent web calendars or something that will work with Mozilla Sunbird though.

For mail any IMAP server will do. Outlook IMAP support isn't that great, but unless you have thousands of files in a folder it should be fine. I really like Cyrus IMAPd, but it's a bit of a pain to setup.

Nice to hear I'm not alone.
I actually don't have a clue about how to schedule a meeting myself, though I do get invited to them, which gives me a reminder 15 minutes ahead of time, which is nice.

Of course, IMO 90% of all meeting are utter crap and a waste of time.

I think I always ignored the invitations.

I agree about meetings being a waste of time though.